The Little Things
by The Sophisticated Shut In
Summary: Fry and Leela's on-again / off-again relationship, seen through the little things.
1. Chapter 1

**Summary : Insights into Fry and Leela's on-again/off-again relationship, from Rebirth onwards. T for mentions of sex, but nothing explicit. This is intended to cover season six (Rebirth to Overclockwise) but I might do 7a as well, if anyone wants it.  
**

* * *

Fry keeps taking her to dinner.

Leela isn't sure how she feels about this. On the one hand she's relieved, because he's respecting her desire to take things slow and rarely even moves in for a kiss at the end of the night.

On the other hand . . . if she keeps eating like this, she's going to burst out of her stretch-pants.

It's not like he's even that into food. Bender has more interest than he does, and the robot has no sense of taste. Still, every Friday, without fail, Fry will now ask her out for dinner, and every Friday, without fail, Leela will agree to it. She debates turning him down from time to time, but she doesn't think she could bear the look on his face if she did. Besides, in a weird way she _is_ having fun.

He brings her flowers every time, and this week is no exception.

(After a month, her apartment looked like a hothouse. It now resembles a Venusian Garden.)

At the restaurant he pulls out her chair for her and holds the door and is otherwise on his best behavior, which is endearing, but not quite as endearing, somehow, as watching him order from a menu he only half understands. Right now he's gawping at his plate and Leela is suppressing a smile.

"It looks like frogspawn," Fry says warily, prodding the quivering yellow pustules with his fork.

Leela sips her wine.

"Close," she says. "Bologrolieeg. It's Neptunian. It's a delicacy there, but the nearest Earth equivalent . . . well, you don't want to know."

"I thought it might be baloney," Fry sighs.

He raises a forkful and steels himself to take a bite, just as Leela says casually "More like whale-sperm omelet."

"_What_?"

"Mmm." Leela twirls her pasta around her fork. "I think that would be it, anyway. Although omelet might not be the right word, and the animal it comes from isn't _exactly_ a whale . . ."

Fry waits for her to continue, and when she doesn't he gags.

He doesn't eat after that, but then, he rarely does. He's too nervous. Fry, Leela is learning, is a completely different person on a date. He behaves normally around her all day, but as soon as he knocks on her door with flowers in hand, his nerves kick into overdrive. He fidgets all through dinner – tugging at his collar, blinking too fast, gesturing too much when he talks – and he's clumsier than ever.

He reaches for her hand across the table and knocks over the salt.

Leela watches it spill onto the floor, like sand rushing from an hourglass, and suddenly she wonders what they're doing.

"Let's get out of here," she says.

* * *

It's a nice night and they both feel better without a table between them. Fry decides he's hungry after all and Leela decides she has room for dessert, so they stop for ice-cream.

His hand is sticky, but she holds it anyway. At the end of the night she's still holding it.

_Oh, what the hell, _she thinks, and she moves in for the kiss.


	2. Chapter 2

**A / N : Thanks Mel and cartoonlover27!**

**I'm going to reference stuff from the show in this, but each chapter is mainly a look at what's going on with Fry and Leela between episodes - the stuff we don't see. The first one was set after _Rebirth_ and this one is set after S6E02, _In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela_. (If you watched the episodes out of order, you can find the full list on The Infosphere.)**

* * *

Fry doesn't know what he and Leela are now. It nags at him.

He takes her out for dinner a lot but he doesn't know if that's a date, or just him trying to convince Leela he's worth dating.

They kiss sometimes, but he doesn't know what that means either. Maybe it doesn't mean anything.

Then the V-Giny demands she sleep with Zapp Brannigan. Leela doesn't even flinch. She just seems annoyed, like she wants to get it over with. Back at work, things go back to normal. Fry isn't jealous, and he's definitely not mad at her, but something feels wrong. He keeps thinking of their dates, and how when they're over, it's like they never happened. It nags at him.

It's Friday, and they're watching tv on the couch. Fry clears his throat nervously. He asks Leela out to dinner every Friday, and every Friday she says yes. He used to think that was a good thing. Now he's not so sure.

"So, um . . ." He drums his fingers on his can of Slurm and keeps his eyes on the tv, trying to act like it's no big deal. "I was wondering if you wanted to grab something to eat later."

Leela yawns.

"Sure," she says, still engrossed in the tv. She stretches out cat-like beside him, and Fry almost loses his nerve. But he has to say it. He _has _to.

"Leela?"

"Hmm?"

Fry swallows.

"You don't have to go if you don't want to."

Leela blinks. He's never said that before and it seems to take her by surprise. After all, she's already agreed. It's not like Fry to risk a good thing by giving her an out.

"Why wouldn't I want to?" she asks slowly.

Fry shrugs. "I dunno."

"Don't you want to?"

"No! I mean . . . yes. I want to," Fry babbles. "I just . . . I wanted you to know that you don't have to go out with me, if you don't want to. You don't have to do anything."

He sneaks a look at Leela. She looks perturbed.

"You're broke," she guesses at last.

"Huh? No!"

Fry lays his wallet on the table as proof. This seems to stump Leela.

"Then what's going on?" she demands.

"Nothing. I just . . . you can say no if you want to," Fry clarifies.

This isn't going well. He wants to ask if he's a bad date, and if they even _are_ dating, or if Leela's just trying not to hurt his feelings - but the words won't come out right, and now Leela's mad at him.

"Fine," she snaps. "We won't go. Problem solved."

She storms out before Fry can explain himself.

* * *

He stays at Planet Express for the rest of the night. He winds up ordering pizza and watching a movie about man-eating ants, which sucks. It sucks even more because Leela's not there.

And then, all of a sudden, she is.

She's standing in the doorway holding a tub of ice-cream.

"I brought dessert," she says shyly.

Fry moves up to make room for her on the couch, but Leela ignores the available space and wedges herself in beside him instead.

They eat the ice-cream watching the late-night movie matinée on Channel 666. Leela yells at the tv a lot, and when the film's heroine walks right into the killer's lair, she hurls her spoon at the screen. They share the remaining spoon, passing it idly back and forth. As the ice-cream starts to melt it dribbles down Fry's arm and he ends up frantically trying to lick his own elbow, which makes Leela smile.

Her smile is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

Fry is just thinking this when another thought nudges to the forefront of his mind.

Zapp Brannigan has never seen Leela smile. Not many people have. There's Nibbler and at her parents, but he can't think of anyone else who can make her smile.

Just him.

_Him_.

The thought is like a balloon swelling in his chest.

Leela falls asleep at 3am with her head on his shoulder. Fry still doesn't know what they are but it makes him happy so maybe, he decides, it doesn't matter.


	3. Chapter 3

**A / N : So . . . Futurama has been cancelled again. It's not a total shock, because this show is _always _getting cancelled, but it still sucks. Here : a spoonful of Fry / Leela fic to help ease the pain.  
**

**Thanks to cartoonlover27 and mel again!  
**

* * *

They're drunk, and Fry's hands have started to wander.

He'd get the message quick enough if she moved them, but Leela isn't sure she wants to. It's been a long dry spell and she can feel herself arching into his touch. They're outside her apartment and she can feel the door frame pressing into her back, against the thin fabric of her dress. How did they get here? She tries to remember through the warm drunk haze clouding her mind. Oh, of course. It's Friday, and Fry is supposed to be kissing her goodnight on her doorstep – except that this Friday's dessert was heavy on the alcohol and it seems to have sparked off something in him. In both of them, actually. The kiss doesn't seem to be ending and there's an edge to it that Leela hasn't felt before, but she likes.

She lets them in without breaking the kiss, dropping her bag and kicking off her shoes as they stumble backward.

"Do you want coffee, or someth-" she starts, but Fry shakes his head.

"Uh-uh," he says firmly.

Leela lets him kiss her again, making her head spin.

She should have known this would happen. They've been dancing around the sex thing for weeks. It's a terrible idea because it's only going to make their not-quite relationship more confusing if they add sex to the mix – she's not stupid, she knows that – but it's getting harder and harder to leave Fry on her doorstep. She just doesn't want to. Still, this is the first time he's been less than a gentleman about it, and _Lord, _he's single-minded when he wants to be. If he'd stood on her doorstep before wearing the look he's giving her right now, she would have dragged him into bed weeks ago.

_Bad idea! Bad idea! _Her sensible side screams at her.

She pulls away with supreme effort.

"This . . . we should take it slow," she tells Fry.

He blinks.

"Oh. Right. No, you're right," he nods. "Taking it slow. We're doing that. That's definitely a thing we're doing."

"And we're drunk," Leela points out.

"Oh, yeah," Fry agrees. "Drunkety-drunk-drunk."

"It's a bad idea."

"Bad."

"We'd regret it in the morning."

"Right."

"Well," Leela finishes. "It's good we agree."

"Definitely."

They stare at each other.

There is a pause of maybe three seconds and then they start to rip each other's clothes off.

* * *

Leela wakes up the next morning with a monster hangover and a bucketful of regret. She's angry with herself and angry with Fry, but he doesn't seem to understand why. He pulls his head out from under the pillow and yawns unconcernedly.

"So we were drunk. I don't see what the problem is."

"It was our first time, Fry," Leela snaps. "I wanted it to be special. Didn't you?"

Fry stares at her like she's from another planet.

"Well, sure . . ." he says slowly. "But -"

"But what?"

Fry touches her cheek, trailing his fingers down her neck and across her shoulders, raising goosebumps on her skin.

"I thought it was," he murmurs.

He kisses her, and the force of her feelings for him takes Leela's breath away.


	4. Chapter 4

There are a lot of surprising things about Leela. The most surprising, Fry has decided, is how, uh . . . adventurous_ . . ._ she can be. He honestly doesn't expect it.

It first happens during a long, boring company meeting. The meeting is about shares, or dividends, or _something_, and Fry is bored out of his head, so he's thinking about Leela instead. He has more than enough to think about because lately, things have been good between them. Really good. Incredibly good. He smiles.

That's when he realizes Leela is staring at him. She catches his eye, and his heart jolts. The look she's giving him is pretty much the one he was just thinking of, the one that means she wants to-

_Oh, _he thinks. _Wait . . . seriously? _

"I have to take this," Leela announces, holding up her cellphone. "It's my parents."

She nudges him pointedly with her foot, and Fry takes the hint.

"Uh, bathroom break," he mutters quickly.

He's convinced he's misreading something here, but when Leela hauls him into the restroom and locks the door, he realizes that, yup, she really _does_ want what he thinks she wants.

Leela checks the time.

"We probably have ten minutes before they start to wonder." She smiles. "So, do you want to – "

The rest of the sentence is lost in Fry's enthusiastic response.

* * *

At first he thinks it must have been a one-off, but it happens again two weeks after that in a restaurant, and a week after _that_ on a delivery to McPluto. Leela seems to have a thing for sex in unusual places.

He asks her about it once.

It's midnight, and they're lying on a heap of their discarded clothes on Monument Beach.

"I wasn't expecting all the sand," Leela complains, shaking it out of her hair. "It gets everywhere, honestly . . ."

"I wasn't expecting all the sex," Fry tells her.

Leela just laughs.

"I guess you only live once," she says lightly. "Besides, you must have had fantasies about me. Like it never crossed your mind to act them out."

"Sure it did, but . . . hey, wait! You had fantasies about me?" Fry's jaw drops.

Leela smiles.

"You'd be shocked."

She bites down gently on his ear and kisses his neck, her tongue flickering against the hollow of his throat. Fry thinks his head might explode.

"Can we have sex again?" he blurts out.

Leela smiles. It's the smile that means he's said something stupid, but it's something she likes.

"What do you think?" she purrs.

"Yes?" Fry hazards. _Please, please, let the answer be yes. _

"Good guess," Leela whispers.


	5. Chapter 5

**A / N : Thanks : Arcadia93!**

**This one is set around the time of _Proposition Infinity_.**

* * *

It unsettles her when Amy breaks up with Kif. On the one hand, Leela can't deny it feels good to have someone when Amy doesn't, but on the other . . . it's a nasty reminder of how fragile relationships can be. People can change. Feelings can change.

That night she watches Fry snore in her bed and battles with herself.

She has to end it.

She has let him in too far already, it's going to hurt too much when he screws it up. When he gets bored. When he leaves her.

These are never "ifs" in Leela's head, always "whens".

It won't work. It _can't _work.

Leela has never been as scared of anything in her life as she is of this relationship, and that has to mean something. She's a rational person, after all. If she's scared there must be a good reason - so she should listen to that nagging inner voice and end this, before things get any worse.

"What's wrong?" Fry mumbles.

Leela jumps. She hadn't noticed him wake.

"Nothing," she says tersely.

"Then why aren't you asleep?"

"Because I'm not."

Fry rubs the sleep from his eyes.

"You wanna talk?" he offers, and Leela's heart twists painfully. But she keeps her tone brusque.

"No. Go back to sleep, if you're sleeping here."

Fry frowns. "I might be stupid," he says reasonably, "but I'm not dumb. _Something's_ up."

Leela glares at him. The delivery boy is bleary-eyed and disheveled from their love-making. God, she loves him. But she can't tell him that. It'll be a hundred times harder to let go of him if he knows.

"You snore," she snaps instead. It feels easier to be annoyed at him. It's a more familiar feeling, and that makes her feel safer, somehow.

But Fry doesn't seem to care. He just smiles lazily, shrugging it off.

"Yeah, I do that," he says easily.

He reaches out to her, trying to pull her into his arms, but Leela jerks away. She can't melt into him, can't let herself be soft and happy and . . and . . . vulnerable. That's what scares her the most. It would be so easy to give this everything, but she has no idea what would come after, and that scares her to death.

Fry stares at her in bewilderment.

"Fine," he mutters.

He lies down again and turns his back on her, sulking.

There is a long, uncomfortable pause. Leela is considering apologizing when Fry's voice floats up to her.

"For the record," he says, "you snore too."


	6. Chapter 6

**A / n : Thanks acadia93, lady bender and Anna for the reviews! (Hey Anna! Yeah, I feel like Leela gets dismissed as a bitch a lot of the time, and I don't think it's fair. I think of her more as insecure and defensive, not a complete hard-ass. And I think she loves Fry too, she's just not as comfortable admitting it. We mainly see her and Fry interact from _his_ perspective, so it's fun to get inside Leela's head and see her point of view.)**

* * *

Leela is mad at him.

Fry isn't sure why. It seems like everything he does annoys her lately. He's childish, he's stupid, he's always late. She doesn't want to have sex with him either, which is weird because she always seems happier when they're having sex.

The days drag by indifferently, and it starts to feel like their thing never happened at all. (Fry calls it a "thing" because he's not sure what it was. Leela was adamant about it not being a relationship, and she used to say things like "we're not really dating", so he guesses they weren't really dating. But they weren't friends either, because, well . . . the sex. It's confusing.)

They're at work. Fry is in the locker room towel-drying his hair, but Leela is still in the shower. The steam floats out to where Fry is standing, turning the tiles slick beneath his feet and pressing the air close in his lungs. He feels a sudden pang in his chest, and it takes him a minute to place it. He misses Leela, he realizes at last. He misses being close to her.

He wanders back into the shower stall, not really knowing what he's about to say.

"Did I do something?" he asks.

Leela is alone in the shower, furiously shampooing her hair. At the sound of his voice, she almost jumps out of her skin.

"Fry!"

"Hey."

"You scared the crap out of me," Leela berates him. She narrows her eye. "What do you want?"

"Are you mad at me?"

Leela turns back to the power shower.

"No," she says. "Just don't sneak up on me like that. You nearly gave me a heart attack."

"That's not what I meant," Fry says. He puts a hand into the spray and catches her wrist. "Did I do something wrong?"

Leela goes still. She's staring at his hand and the water must be hotter than he thinks, because her cheeks are pink and her breathing has gone funny. She tugs her arm away abruptly.

"No," she says at last. "You didn't do anything. I need some space, that's all."

"Oh. Well . . . it's your birthday next week. I was gonna take you out for dinner but if you don't want to . . ."

Fry trails off, unsure. There is a long pause, then :

"Lunch," Leela says. She wraps a towel around herself firmly. "You can take me out for lunch."

It's clear enough why she's chosen lunch. It's neutral, and there's no chance they'll wind up back at hers if they have work in the afternoon. No chance of a kiss on her doorstep. She's keeping him at arm's length again, but Fry doesn't care. He seizes on it gratefully.

"Lunch! It'll be the best lunch ever," he promises her. "I'll take you somewhere really fancy."

"You thought that pizza place was fancy," Leela reminds him.

"Well, yeah. They had two types of water! Tap water _and _spring water." Fry shakes his head in wonder, speckling Leela with little drops of water. "Oops, sorry." He rubs his hair vigorously with the towel. "No," he decides. "I'll take you to Elzar's. Elzar's is fancy, right?"

Leela smiles a little.

"Nearly as fancy as The Cavern on the Green," she concedes.

"Then it's a date!" Fry declares. "Uh. I mean, not a date. Help me out here."

Leela sighs.

"I'll see you then."


	7. Chapter 7

**Thanks , LadyBender and acadia93 for the reviews!**

* * *

Fry is acting weird.

For a start, he showed up on time for dinner. He would have been stupid not to, of course, after he stood her up at lunch, but Leela wasn't expecting him to be _exactly _on time. He isn't the most focused of people at the best of times, and in her experience nerves make it worse. If she's honest, she was expecting him to be only less late than usual - or to arrive on time and have forgotten something, which is a frequent Fry habit. But he hasn't. He's on time. Dressed for a date and everything. Even he seems surprised by it.

The second strange thing is that he doesn't seem nervous. Normally, nothing intimidates Fry like a date, and the swankier the setting, the worse it gets. By rights, The Cavern On The Green should be terrifying him, but he hardly seems to have noticed his surroundings. He doesn't even blink when the snooty waiter tells him they don't do tap water, and he hardly looks at the menu. It's only when the maitre'd starts to tell them about the formation of the restaurant's famous stalactites and stalagmites that he shows any interest.

"Yeah," he says, interrupting the lecture on dripping limestone and calcium deposits. "So if you drilled holes in the roof you could come back millions of years later and they'd spell out a message. Like : _I LOVE YOU LEELA." _

He mimes drilling this into the cavern roof and wiggles his fingers to enact the message growing up from the floor.

The maitre'd frowns at this unconventional restaurant etiquette. Leela gets the impression people usually just listen to the lecture and nod politely.

"Anything is possible, sir," the man sneers.

Fry grins. "_Everything's_ possible."

"You really believe that?" Leela asks him, as the maitre'd glides away.

Fry just smiles at her.

"Sure I do," he says. "I'm here. You're here. We're having dinner. What's more impossible than that?"

This is either the smartest thing he's ever said or the stupidest. Leela's not sure which.

"And that's what you'd write?" she asks. "If you could leave a message that would last millions of years, you'd write-"

"I love you." Fry finishes the sentence for her. "Yeah, I would."

A lump forms in her throat and Leela has to take a pretty big gulp of wine to get rid of it.

* * *

After dinner they take a walk, and Fry remembers he bought her a card – and lost it, which is more like the Fry she knows.

"That's okay," Leela tells him. "I don't really like cards. What I'll remember is our time together."

She wonders how long that will last as they stare up at the stars. It won't be a million years anyway, and deep down she hates the thought.

Maybe that's why she kisses him. Maybe that's why she lets him walk her home. And maybe that's why she takes him inside at the end of the night and shuts the rest of the world firmly out.


	8. Chapter 8

**A / N : Thanks jack frost lover cadi93, futuramalover27 and mel for leaving me reviews!**

* * *

Leela lets Fry walk her home after her birthday dinner. When he kisses her outside her apartment she just breathes "Stay", and he nods, because there's no way he needs telling twice.

Two days later he's still there. By now Leela's all out of frozen dinners and her apartment looks like a bomb hit it, which is how anywhere looks once Fry's been living there a few days.

They're lying in bed, watching _Tea With Titans_ at four in the afternoon.

Well, Leela's watching it. Fry is mainly watching her, because she's beautiful and funny without meaning to be, and he thinks he could maybe watch her forever. He's never been so in love. It's better than video games, better than drugs, better than _anything_.

On the TV, Morbo and Mom are discussing her portfolio.

_I didn't know Mom was an artist, _Fry thinks vaguely.

Leela yawns.

It's a good yawn. She throws her arms up over her head, pressing the heel of her hands against the bed board, and her whole body arches ; her toes curl into the sheets before she goes limp again. She sighs.

"I'm hungry. Let's get take-out."

"Nngghh," Fry says, dazed.

"What do you want? Pizza? I'll pay."

"Uh."

"We could get Neptunian food."

"Uh?"

"Fry!" Leela snaps. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Sure . . ."

"Then what do you want?"

There is a long pause, while Leela stares at him impatiently and Fry's brain scrambles to catch up. It finally hits him that she's asking him questions, and he panics.

"The first thing?" he says hopefully.

"Pizza."

"Yeah. Yeah! Pizza." Fry breathes a mental sigh of relief. Pizza sounds good. She must have asked him about food. Now that he thinks about it, he is kind of hungry.

_She's so smart, _he thinks happily.

Leela hunts for a take-out menu among the mess. Eventually she finds one in the pocket of his jacket and sits back down on the bed.

"What do you want on it?" she asks, but Fry isn't listening again. He's watching her read the menu. Her hair keeps falling in her eye without her scrunchie to hold it back. She flicks it away impatiently and moves the menu closer to her face, because she hasn't put in her contact lens either and she can't see properly.

"You're so beautiful," Fry blurts out.

Leela frowns.

"It's just pizza," she says suspiciously. "There's no need to – why are you staring at me?"

"Because . . . you," Fry says incoherently. It always makes him nervous when she glares at him like that. "Beautiful," he manages. "You are."

Leela turns red.

"I'll go order," she says quickly, and she vanishes into the kitchen. When she comes back she's wearing his t-shirt, which Fry can't help but feel sad about.

She must be cold, he decides, and doesn't think any more about it.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N : This one is set during _The Prisoner Of Benda_. Lines lifted from that episode (there are quite a few) are obviously not mine. (Just in case posting on a fan fiction website doesn't make it clear I'm just a sad penniless fan who owns nothing.) **

**Thanks to invader rainbowdash, mel, LadyBender, Anna and Jack frost lover cadi93 for the feedback!**

* * *

Lately, Leela can't stop staring at her own reflection. It's bugging her.

She's alone in her apartment, getting ready for work, and the mirror is still steamed up from her morning shower. Leela wipes the fog away, watching as her face comes into focus. She keeps hoping to see something new, something different, something . . . beautiful.

She never does.

She looks at herself in the mirror today and all she sees are flaws. Her nose is too big. The violet of her hair makes her look washed-out. Her frame is solid and well-honed, dense with muscle, not petite like Amy. Her feet are huge. And her eye . . . dear god, it's awful. It's a wonder people don't run screaming from her in the street. (_Actually_, she reminds herself, _they do_. Mostly kids and hillbillies, but it still hurts.)

She's not beautiful. She can't be beautiful. She's strong, and she's used to her body, and sometimes when she looks at herself she sees her parents in her own reflection and gets a warm, bone-deep feeling of belonging to someone. But she's not beautiful.

So why the hell does Fry keep telling her she is?

Leela can't work it out, and she's driving herself crazy looking at her own reflection, hoping to somehow see what he sees. It just doesn't make any sense.

As far as Leela can tell, Fry only dates two kinds of people. There are the girls who are beautiful but bitchy – Michelle, Colleen, Amy – and then there are the downright freaky _things_, like Yivo. Is that how he sees her? Maybe he gets off on that. The thought makes her feel a little sick. She doesn't want to be someone else's fetish, she wants to be _her_. Fry was the only person she ever thought could see past her eye, but what if she was wrong? What if she's just some hot alien chick to him? Or what if he really likes her and is just pretending her eye doesn't freak him out, to make her feel better?

Leela can't decide which would be worse. The one thing she knows for sure is that she only ever dates one kind of person : assholes.

* * *

"It's so round," she insists one day. "So hideously round . . ."

They're sitting on the couch and she's staring at her eye in a hand mirror. Amy left it lying around and with Fry sitting right beside her, Leela couldn't help herself. It's driving her mad trying to figure him out. Something he says will _have_ to make it clearer.

But Fry just seems baffled.

"Leela, listen," he says reassuringly. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known."

He sounds so sincere it's impossible to disbelieve him. Which means he's telling the truth, or he thinks he is. Which means . . . .

_He really thinks she's beautiful. _

"Oh."

The thought is so overwhelming Leela can't process it. So, perversely, her brain finds a negative instead.

"So you only care about my looks?" she hears herself accuse him. It's crazy, but not as crazy as the idea of Fry somehow finding her perfect just the way she is. That's impossible.

* * *

Later on - when they experiment with the Professor's mind-switching machine - Leela sees him drooling over the idea of her in Amy's body, and watches him recoil from her in the Professor's, and she feels a savage stab of triumph. He _is _that shallow, she knew it. She should have listened to her gut all along.

Then Fry puts his mind into Zoidberg's body, and all she can hear her gut telling her is "Ew, gross."

The worst thing is that Fry knows it. He may not be the smartest person, but he keeps doing this – turning her thinking on its head, making her question everything she thought she knew. He's been doing it from the moment they met, actually. She loves it and hates it at the same time.

"I challenge you to a romantic dinner at Elzar's!" Fry says, and Leela tells him it's on, because he's making her too mad to think straight.

* * *

They end up battling to outdo each other over dinner, each of them determined to prove the other is more shallow. It's crazy, but strangely exhilarating. Oh, and completely disgusting. That goes without saying.

"Oh, did my bodily infirmity embarrass you?" Leela asks sweetly, as she spits out her false teeth.

Fry shudders, but rallies surprisingly well.

"Not at all," he says nobly. "It's just another thing that makes you a very special lady."

Damn, he's good. To hell with subtlety, then. It's time to break out the big gun.

"You mean, like my penis?" Leela demands. She's pleased when Fry gags in response, but the action is so revolting in Zoidberg's body that she can't help crying out in disgust, unintentionally ceding ground.

"Admit it! You're disgusted by me!" Fry says.

"No, you're disgusted by me!" Leela retorts. She is _not _the hypocrite here.

"I'm as attracted to you as I've ever been!" Fry tells her, which just plain infuriates Leela, so . . .

"Prove it!" she yells. This will probably win her the argument at the cost of her relationship, but right now, Leela doesn't care. Fry is a shallow jerk and the sooner she makes him see that, the -

_Oh. _

He's kissing her. And it feels _good._


	10. Chapter 10

**A / n : Picking up where we left off with this chapter. Thanks to Mel, Jack Frostlover, Secret Marial, and PhineasFlynns for the feedback! Now enjoy some more grossly cute body-swapped Freela. You know you want to.**

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Fry decides that if he lives to be a hundred and ninety-two, he'll never have weirder sex than this. He's in Zoidberg's body and Leela is in Professor Farnsworth's. The weirdest thing, though, is that that isn't nearly as gross as it sounds. She's Leela and he's Fry, and that's all there is to it. His heart still goes crazy when she kisses him and he still feels blissfully happy when she sighs contentedly against his chest.

He does kind of wish he'd let her put her teeth back in before he kissed her, but that's really it.

Zoidberg calls to tell him he set the apartment on fire, so Fry doesn't bother going home. He stays the night at Leela's instead.

"Should we talk about this?" Leela asks.

She's holding up a paper chain while Fry snips patterns in it with his Zoidberg claws. It's fun.

"Talk about what?"

Leela gestures at the two of them.

"This," she says. "Is it weird? It should be weird, right?"

Fry shrugs. "I dunno. It wasn't weird for me," he admits. "It's like . . . like we had sex in really weird outfits. And I had to be careful where I was putting my hands. And also, I have these things." He wiggles his face tentacles, which are surprisingly dextrous. "They're super fun." He shrugs again. "I liked it."

Leela thinks about this, then nods.

"That's how I felt," she tells him. She unfolds the paper and sees that it's a string of paper Benders.

"Neat," they say together, and Leela laughs.

She loops the paper chain around the headboard of the bed.

"Fry?"

"Yeah?"

"What if we're stuck like this?"

Fry looks at her. She's worried. It's funny how he can still tell. It's in her expression, all wide-eyed and serious, just beginning to frown.

Leela worries a lot. _Maybe that's what it's like to be smart_, Fry thinks hazily. He has to really _think_ about this stuff, but Leela seems to do it automatically, so it seems like there's always something bothering her. Like what stuff means, and what people really think, and what's going to happen in the future.

Fry doesn't have so many levels. Usually it's all he can do to focus on what's happening right now.

"Then I guess we'd be stuck," he says uselessly.

Leela sighs, and Fry feels guilty. She wants something deeper, but Fry can't figure out what. They're never on the same level with this stuff.

He tries.

"You'd never have to pay full-price at the movies."

"Great," Leela says flatly.

He's not trying hard enough, Fry realizes. _C'mon, brain, think! _He forces himself to try and picture a future in which they're stuck in these bodies forever, and then he has to try and imagine how he'd feel. It's exhausting. Leela can't do this all the time. No way. She'd go crazy.

"I think it would be okay," he manages at last. "Only . . . I think I'd miss you."

He thinks again.

"I'd miss your eye. And your boobs. And your hair. It's all soft and pretty but when you turn round really fast it hits people in the face." He sniggers. "That's funny even when it's me."

"So you'd miss my body," Leela says. Her expression is neutral, like she's waiting for him to say more.

"Sure I would," Fry replies. "I love your body."

When her face crumples, he realizes this might have been the wrong thing to say. Fry frowns, which feels weird with Zoidberg's face. He puts his claw clumsily on top of Leela's hand.

"But I love your body because you're in it," he tells her.

And for once, to Fry's amazement, it turns out that what he's thinking is the right thing to say. Leela smiles shyly, turning pink, and lets the subject drop.


End file.
